British police said Saturday they have launched an investigation into the “unexplained death” of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who was found dead at his home in southeast England on Saturday.

“His death is currently being treated as unexplained and a full inquiry is under way. The area around the property has been cordoned off in order to allow the investigation to take place,” police said in a statement obtained by Reuters.

The statement did not directly identify the 67-year-old businessman, but Thames Valley police said they were investigating the death of a man of the same age at a property in Ascot, a town 25 miles west of London.

Boris Berezovsky, a self-exiled and outspoken oligarch, had a bitter falling out with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, the one-time Kremlin powerbroker-turned-thorn in Putin’s side fended off verbal and legal attacks in cases that often bore political undertones — and bit into his fortune.

Lawyer Alexander Dobrovinsky told Russian state TV that his client — who had survived assassination attempts in the past — lately had been in “a horrible, terrible” emotional state.

“All he had was debts,” Dobrovinsky said. “He was practically destroyed. He was selling his paintings and other things.”

A mathematician-turned-Mercedes dealer, Berezovsky amassed his wealth during Russia‘s chaotic privatization of state assets in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In return for backing former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, he gained political clout and opportunities to buy state assets at knockdown prices, making a fortune in oil and automobiles.

He also played a key role in brokering the rise of Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, in 2000. But Berezovsky later fell out of favor with Putin, and eventually sought political asylum in the U.K. in the early 2000s to evade fraud charges he contended were politically motivated.

Berezovsky was one of several so-called Russian “oligarchs” to butt heads with Putin.

After coming into power, the Russian president effectively made a pact: the oligarchs could keep their money if they didn’t challenge him politically. Those who refused often found themselves in dire circumstances. Some were imprisoned — like the former Yukos Oil chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky — while others, like Berezovsky, fled Russia.

The assets of these pariah businessmen, meanwhile, were acquired by state corporations or cooperative tycoons, often at bargain prices.

Over the years, Berezovsky accused Putin of leading Russia toward dictatorship and returning it to a Soviet-style system of state monopoly on the media.

In the U.K., Berezovsky allied himself with an array of other Kremlin critics. Among them was ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who fled Russia with Berezovsky’s help after accusing officials there of plotting to assassinate political opponents.

Litvinenko died on Nov. 26, 2006, after drinking tea laced with a lethal dose of the rare radioactive isotope polonium-210 in a London hotel. From his deathbed, Litvinenko accused the Kremlin of orchestrating his poisoning, and British police named former KGB agent Andrei Lugovoi as the prime suspect.

Both Lugovoi and the Kremlin denied the accusations, with the former instead claiming that Berezovsky — whom Russia repeatedly …read more
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